Girl Stabbed at Gay Pride Parade Dies

In this Thursday, July 30, 2015 photo, ultra-Orthodox Jew Yishai Schlissel is detained by plain-clothes police officers after he stabbed people during a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

(Newser)
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A teenage girl seriously wounded after an anti-gay extremist stabbed her and several others in last week's attack on Jerusalem's gay pride parade died yesterday. Shira Banki, 16, succumbed to her wounds, and her organs will be donated, a Hadassah Medical Center spokeswoman says. The girl was among six people wounded Thursday by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man, Yishai Schlissel, who had carried out a similar attack on a gay pride parade in 2005.

He had angrily spoken out against the parade after his release from prison just three weeks earlier. The parade was making its way through central Jerusalem when he lunged into the march, stabbing people with a long-bladed knife before being apprehended by police. (Read more Israel stories.)

I wish I wouldn't continue reading posts after about the middle of the page.

njgreen

Aug 3, 2015 11:47 AM CDT

He came from a settlement on the West Bank. So did the animals who burned the Palestinian baby girl to death. More than ever, the argument that the settlements are somehow a benefit to Israel's national security proves to be patently false. At best, the settlements are a drain on government resources, a source of injustice and terror to the Palestinians, and a massive impediment to peace with Israel's neighbors; and at worst, we now see they are the breeding ground for ISIS-like Jewish terrorists who are a threat to the Israeli state itself. Israel needs to deal harshly and swiftly with these criminals. After that, it needs to reassert the rule of law over these settlements, dismantle them, and deport those inhabitants who refuse to recognize the authority of the democratically-elected Israeli government.